Tag: lists

The following are WordPress plugins I find myself using and recommending regularly. In the interest of making this available to everyone, here’s the full list:

WordPress.com Custom CSS – Use your own CSS to tweak your website without modifying your theme’s files. Includes a revision history so you can always backtrack to prior versions. This is a feature WordPress.com charges $14.97/year for and has saved the J-School significant pain.

Emphasis – Paragraph- and sentence-level linking and highlighting. Originally developed for nytimes.com, Michael Donohoe open-sourced the code and Ben Balter made it into a WordPress plugin. Every website should have emphasis.

Restrict Multisite Plugins – For those running multisite instances, allow your users to activate only a limited number of approved plugins. Interface is very similar to WordPress’ network theme management.

Regularly updated and well-rated – The plugin has been updated in the last 6 months or so by its author. WordPress adds new features regularly, so it’s necessary the developer keep the plugin compatible with the latest version. Active users can also indicate whether the most recent version of the plugin is compatible with the most recent version of WordPress. You can find this information on the right hand of the plugin’s profile page.

Performs well – A couple of ways you can see whether it’s a good plugin are googling the name of the plugin to see if there’s any negative feedback, or looking in the support forums. If there are a lot of site comments or discussion threads complaining about problems with the plugin, it’s usually a bad sign.

Earlier today, I received a request to put together a synthesis of the future of news discussion thus far. As such, I spent an hour or so going through my 600+ journalism links and now present the definitive, canonical reading list, a collection of both popular posts and hidden gems from the last 18 months or so that I’ve been paying attention to the industry.

Explaining the past

The [Monday] Papers
An epic laundry list of everything that needs to be said about the newspaper industry.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in media criticism this year has been making discussions on ‘Future of News’ more than a debate between New and Old Media. Just because a news organization established itself and started publishing recently doesn’t mean that the way they are publishing is any different than in the past. Many of the biggest news organizations to spring up in the last few years that are largely considered to be ‘new media’ — The Huffington Post, Gawker, Politico, Tech Crunch — are fundamentally similar to the NYT. That is to say, they are trustee media, they stake a claim on a certain beat and a handful of editors ultimately control everything that is published.

Open memo on how to right a sinking ship
A synthesis of all the advice I would give newspapers struggling to reinvent themselves: experiment with business models, improve your relationship with your community, and invest in your technology.

When the good-intentioned pursuit of truth leads the truth-seekers to lie (to themselves, to readers; by inclusion or omission) rather than break their code, there’s probably something wrong with the code.

Seeds for the future

This isn’t copyright advice: What I’m really saying is we have to begin learning how to add value to the information we collect, and then put that information into a thoughtful structure to retain and expand that value.

Idea for the future of journalism: newspapers as providers of structured information for any given community. The scarcity is having that data in the aggregate.

Attention Is the Real Resource
Gruber prices advertisements in his full RSS feed at a premium because his readers are more engaged than one-off webpage visits.